The coming audit and compliance wave in financial services

If your financial services firm hasn’t seen a compliance audit yet, it’s probably because the government hasn’t quite gotten its act together.  With the passage of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, stricter regulations – and the audits that accompany them – are inevitable.  Here are some things you should think about as you prepare:

• Hot-hot disaster recovery: You can’t afford to lose any of your customers’ data.  In the event of a disaster, you need to make sure your primary data is synchronized – in real-time – to a secondary site
• Secure data transport: Now that you’re synchronizing data between sites, you must ensure that it’s protected as it travels across the wire
• Automate your audit trail: You have too many transactions to manually maintain an audit trail.  Make sure you have a solution in place that will automatically create a message audit trail
  • Consolidate your compliance information: When the auditor arrives, you need to have one central repository for your compliance information.  You need a solution that can funnel all your relevant data into your compliance system

Too many compliance officers spend the bulk of their time searching for and manually processing data.  With the right systems in place, compliance officers can quickly understand the gaps in their companies’ compliance, and take steps to make real progress toward compliance. 

How does your business handle compliance?  Do you have the ability to automate your audit trail?